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Luxury electric carmaker Tesla this week acquired a small, Minnesota-based factory automation company, in hopes of fixing unexpected bottlenecks on its Model 3 production line. Perbix launched in 1976 and employs 150 people in a suburb north of Minneapolis. Tesla said it’s worked with the engineering firm for nearly three years, on a number of projects on the production line at its Fremont car factory and its Gigafactory in Reno. Terms of the deal were not immediately released.

In 2016, California shipped recyclables with a value of $21 million by air to Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Trash worth $108 million went by rail or truck to Mexico. But $4.6 billion worth of recyclables, 15 million tons, were shipped out from California’s ports. By far the greatest share of our recyclables, 62 percent, went to China.

Seaborne exports of all commodities from California ports in 2016 totaled 63 million tons, with a vessel value of more than $89 billion. Recyclable material accounted for 24 percent of the commodities exports by weight, 5 percent by value.

Electric-car maker Tesla has reached an agreement to set up its own manufacturing facility in Shanghai, according to people briefed on the plan, a move that could help it gain traction in China’s fast-growing market for electric vehicles.

The deal with Shanghai’s government will allow the Silicon Valley auto maker to build a wholly owned factory in the city’s free-trade zone, these people said. This arrangement, the first of its kind for a foreign auto maker, could enable Tesla to slash production costs, but it would still likely incur China’s 25% import tariff.

Batteries have emerged as a critical front in China’s campaign to be the global leader in electric vehicles, but foreign auto makers and experts say it is rigging the market to favor domestic suppliers.

Tianjin Lishen Battery Co. here in eastern China recently agreed to sell its battery packs to Kia Motors for the EVs the South Korean company makes in China and is now in talks to supply General Motors , Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen , a supervisor for the Chinese company said.

But that is largely because Tianjin Lishen has little foreign competition.

Foreign batteries aren’t banned in China, but auto makers must use ones from a government-approved list to qualify for generous EV subsidies. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s list includes 57 manufacturers, all of them Chinese.

The U.S. enjoys a giant trade surplus in scrap, including household recycling, says the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. According to the trade group’s chief economist, Joe Pickard : “We’re like the Saudi Arabia of scrap.”

Now there’s a heap of trouble confronting America’s separators of paper and plastic: The biggest buyer of the stuff doesn’t want it anymore.

. . . The U.S. is the top producer of waste, according to the World Bank, and Americans have been doing a pretty good job recycling some of that. Curbside-recycling volumes have tripled since the late 1980s, surpassing 89 million tons in 2014, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest figures.

What most Americans don’t know is that after workers pick up and sort their recycling, a good deal travels halfway around the world. The U.S. exported $16.5 billion in scrap last year, the scrap institute says, more than any other country. Paper and plastic were about $3.9 billion of that.

Over two-thirds of America’s wastepaper exports and more than 40% of its discarded-plastic exports ended up in China last year, the scrap institute says. Paper and plastic scrap exports to mainland China topped $2.2 billion—that’s more than exports to China of wheat, rice, corn, meat, dairy and vegetables combined, U.S. census data show.

In July, China filed a notice with the World Trade Organization about its plans to limit the entry of “foreign waste.” Even before that, starting this spring, scrap shippers say, some Chinese customers hadn’t been able to renew their import licenses.

Following Ford’s announcement that it would shift more resources to electric cars, the United Auto Workers has begun talks with the automaker about the potential impact of more electric-car production on jobs.

. . . In a presentation to investors earlier this week, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said electric cars will reduce “hours to build” by 30 percent compared to internal-combustion models. If a car takes less time to build, the carmaker won’t need as many workers. Settles said he has met one-on-one with Hackett to discuss the issue.

Investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into business practices at Renovate America Inc., the largest provider of energy-saving home-improvement loans, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Scott McKinlay, Renovate America’s chief legal officer, said in a statement that “we have been assured that Renovate America is not a target of an FBI investigation. We believe from our discussions with the FBI about its investigation of a contractor with whom we have done business that it is likely our company has come up in the context of those FBI interviews.” Renovate America is the largest lender in one of the U.S.’s fastest-growing loan programs known as Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE. Private lenders in the PACE program team up with local governments to make loans to purchase solar panels and energy-efficient appliances.

Fresno City Council members say they’ve received complaints for years from residents and businesses about recycling centers operating from shipping containers in shopping center parking lots, providing a few cents in cash for each can or bottle that people bring in for redemption.

On Thursday, the council approved a new ordinance to seriously restrict how and where such recyclers – called CRV (California Redemption Value) recycling centers – can operate. The 7-0 vote is the first step toward final approval, most likely in two weeks. The law, sponsored by Councilmen Paul Caprioglio and Oliver Baines, would take effect 30 days after a final vote.

Once that happens, the law will effectively put 16 of Fresno’s 22 CRV recycling centers out of business within six months to a year. The centers are where people can get back the nickel that grocers charge for every can or bottle of soft drink, beer or other beverages that carries a California Redemption Value stamp.

. . . a Wall Street Journal analysis of tax data in 40 counties in California—by far the biggest market for PACE loans—shows that defaults have jumped over the last year. Roughly 1,100 borrowers missed two consecutive payments in the tax year that ended June 30, compared with 245 over the previous year. That means they are in default, and could potentially have their homes auctioned off by local governments within five years.

The drive to replace polluting petrol and diesel cars with a new breed of electric vehicles has gathered momentum in recent weeks. But there is an unanswered environmental question at the heart of the electric car movement: what on earth to do with their half-tonne lithium-ion batteries when they wear out?

. . . in the EU as few as 5% (pdf) of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. This has an environmental cost. Not only do the batteries carry a risk of giving off toxic gases if damaged, but core ingredients such as lithium and cobalt are finite and extraction can lead to water pollution and depletion among other environmental consequences.

Faraday Future is running on fumes. But it’s still running. The Gardena-based luxury electric car start-up raised $14 million in emergency funding and will lease an old factory near Fresno that will enable it to turn out 10,000 cars a year. The company has dramatically lowered its ambitions. Its goal now is to try to remain solvent enough to start manufacturing and selling the FF 91, a powerful, technology-packed luxurious electric sedan with a base price expected to top $100,000. As recently as last year, the company had plans to turn out 150,000 cars a year from a massive new $5-billion assembly plant near Las Vegas.

California’s politicians and civic leaders have portrayed Tesla as the crown jewel of the state’s efforts to build a new economy for the 21st century while dramatically reducing carbon emissions. Gov. Jerry Brown has set a goal of having 1.5 million battery- or hydrogen-powered “zero emission vehicles” or ZEVs on California roads by 2025, roughly five times their current numbers, with ZEVs being 15 percent of all new car sales by then. Toward that end, the state has been an indirect investor in Tesla through corporate tax breaks and direct subsidies to purchasers of its cars. Tesla has also benefited handsomely by selling credits to other automakers in lieu of their meeting state quotas for making and selling ZEVs. If Tesla doesn’t deliver on its ambitious production and sales goals for Model 3 and finally become profitable, it will not only be a huge setback for Musk and other stockholders, but for the politicians who are also betting on its success.

In early 2016, electric vehicle company Faraday Future celebrated a deal with the state of Nevada—in exchange for building a $1 billion factory that would eventually employ up to 4,500 people, the company would get $335 million in tax cuts from the state. Later that year, Faraday Future negotiated another deal on a former Navy shipyard in Vallejo, California. There, the electric vehicle company would build a second factory and a “customer experience center.” Now, neither of those two projects is happening as planned. In March, Faraday Future said it would not move forward with the Vallejo site and told investors that it would be cutting its billion-dollar Nevada site down considerably, from a three-million-square-foot facility to a 650,000-square-foot facility. Earlier this month, the Le Eco-backed startup said it wouldn’t be building on the Nevada site at all, opting to put a base at a smaller site in either California or Nevada. It will, however, hold the property it bought at the site for “long-term vehicle manufacturing,” according to the Nevada Independent.

Lu Fang, secretary general of the photovoltaics decision in the China Renewable Energy Society, wrote in an article circulating on mainland social media this month that the country’s cumulative capacity of retired panels would reach up to 70 gigawatts (GW) by 2034.

That is three times the scale of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower project, by power production.

By 2050 these waste panels would add up to 20 million tonnes, or 2,000 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, according to Lu.

. . . A panel’s lifespan ranges from 20 to 30 years, depending on the environment in which they are used, according to the US Department of Energy. High temperatures can accelerate the ageing process for solar cells, while other negative factors – such as the weight of snow or dust storms – could cause material fatigue on the surface and internal electric circuits, gradually reducing the panel’s power output.

Even as Wall Street bulls tout Tesla’s stock, almost a conspiracy of silence has surrounded the most interesting questions. One of these concerns what happens when 300,000 customers who deposited $1,000 each for the forthcoming Tesla Model 3 learn that the $7,500 federal tax credit will expire before they can get their hands on it. Now we know. Tesla may not be too big to fail as far as the federal government is concerned, but it certainly is too big to fail as far as California politicians are concerned. As enthusiast site GreenCarReports.com says frankly of AB 1184, a bill recently passed by the state Assembly and awaiting Senate action: “CA bill would make up for federal electric-car incentives as they expire.”